The Internet has enabled the ubiquitous, effortless, and cost-free sharing of all types of information including graphics, text, and multimedia. The popularity of the Internet is due, in part, to the ease with which information, stored in digital form, may be disseminated to a mass audience. Information available on the Internet, however, may be protected by trademarks, copyrights, licenses, or patents. Since the information may be easily copied, some individuals or organizations may wish to appropriate the information for their own uses, in violation of applicable intellectual property laws. As organizations shift more resources toward the Internet, illegal use of such proprietary information is likely to worsen.
Organizations have an interest in identifying patent infringements and unapproved or inappropriate uses of copyrights, licenses and trademarks. A corporation, for example, may desire to restrict its software to only licensed users. The corporation must, therefore, monitor the Internet for unauthorized distribution sites. With the rapidly increasing number of Internet sites, however, it is extremely difficult to monitor all of the Internet sites for all potential violations.
The conventional approach to detecting intellectual property violations requires a user to search the Internet, using a manual search engine such as Yahoo.RTM., Hotbot.RTM., or Infoseek.RTM.. The user simply enters one or more key words and the selected search engine returns a list of sites containing the key word(s). Alternatively, the user may conduct boolean searches where certain terms are excluded and other terms are included. The use of these search engines is extremely time consuming, since the user must then manually search through the many (sometimes thousands of) sites that contain the key word(s) to locate possible intellectual property violations.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a device and method that automatically identifies potential intellectual property infringement in computer networks such as the Internet, thereby reducing the number of sites through which the user must search.